Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City: The New York City public-school system is 41 percent Latino, 27 percent black and 16 percent Asian. Three-quarters of all students are low-income. In 2014, the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, released a report showing that New York City public schools are among the most segregated in the country. Black and Latino children here have become increasingly isolated, with 85 percent of black students and 75 percent of Latino students attending “intensely” segregated schools — schools that are less than 10 percent white.[more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen
on Jun 16, 2016 -
25 comments

Bon Appétit looks for Brooklyn in the Midwest. The Midwest is not impressed.
In his survey of restaurants and chefs in Indianapolis with hipster credentials, John Birdsall looks for evidence of cultural Brooklynization of the Midwest, and he finds it. Eater contributing editor Sarah Freeman would beg to differ, or at least demand some more analysis, and certain chefs take her side. All of which raises some interesting questions about cultural migration and appropriation and "authenticity" that can't be answered in a pair of articles (the first of which is really more of a travelogue than a fleshed-out thesis), but the questions they raise are FUN.
posted by JimInLoganSquare
on Feb 25, 2016 -
120 comments

"The rich Jewish traditions in the city of Uzhhorod were all but wiped out by Nazi death camps and decades of Soviet rule. Now one born-and-bred New Yorker aims to bring them back, one perfectly browned challah at a time." "Bringing a Bite of Old Brooklyn to Ukraine," by János Chialá, Tali Mayer, and Ilya Ginzburg.
posted by MonkeyToes
on Feb 4, 2016 -
24 comments

It is still possible in Park Slope, for example, to rent a duplex with a garden for $200 a month, a half-block from the subway [...] Hundreds of people are discovering that Brooklyn has become the Sane Alternative: a part of New York where you can live a decent urban life without going broke, where you can educate your children without having the income of an Onassis, a place where it is still possible to see the sky, and all of it only 15 minutes from Wall Street.

What you do when apartment hunting online, and what a lot of people do, I imagine, is you plug in your preferred neighborhood/price range/amenities/etc., and then out pops a long list of results that you further refine by imagining a very specific and very fictionalized narrative involving a version of yourself that isn’t necessarily true right now but could be true if you lived in apartment X. No, you’ve never wielded a wrench for any longer than the time it takes to pass it to your dad, but why couldn’t you fix a fixer-upper? Or be the kind of person to share one bathroom with six other roommates? Or live with a Ukrainian family that’s gone for five months out of the year, but whose kids you’re expected to babysit as per your new rental agreement?

Advice on how to survive late capitalism: "Your life is sold to serve an economy that does not serve your life. You don’t seem to be entertained, Bank-robbin’; your white-hot rage festers. It probably doesn’t help that you live in Brooklyn—this place where in the last ten years rent has spiked 77 percent while real median income has dropped, where the rich (the top 10 percent of earners who, as is well known, control 80 percent of the wealth) and their children live right on top of some of the worst poverty known to this country, while 20 percent of Brooklynites survive somehow below the poverty level, such that the widening income and wealth gap becomes achingly visible here. I could advise you to leave Brooklyn. But I don’t want you to leave Brooklyn."
posted by Snarl Furillo
on Aug 1, 2014 -
74 comments

As a baby, Christina Rivera survived a massacre in Brooklyn whose 10 victims included her mother. Police Officer Joanne Jaffe was assigned to care for her that night, a task that was the first link in a bond that led Ms. Jaffe to adopt Christina. [Image]

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